AHMEDABAD: It took the city survey department — entrusted with preparing property cards for Amdavadis — 27 years to ask the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) if any illegal construction has been reported on any piece of land which has societies and apartments.

This is an important move as property cards issued to owners of tenements, bungalows, flats, or commercial property should be carrying details of illegal extensions or constructions, whether they are regularized, and whether there has been a "change of use" of a property.

The department is yet to update its own records regarding the "current use of property" and the number of owners of a particular plot, in many areas of the city. On January 17, the superintendent of land records wrote a letter to the AMC and sought details of illegal constructions. The AMC has received 2,43,105 applications for regularization under the Impact Fee legislation, till January 26, 2015.

Thanks to an RTI application filed by a Kalupur resident, Pankaj Bhatt, the superintendent of land records was forced to dig the city survey department's records and fish out an October 1988 notification. This notification had required the superintendent of land records to periodically review property records regarding illegal constructions with the help of AMC data. These reports of illegal constructions were supposed to be made part of property cards that are being issued by the department to citizens. "If you were to buy a property in Ahmedabad, revenue records tell you the history of a property," says Bhatt. "But in Ahmedabad it is still an unfinished job. Of the 226 town planning schemes that have been prepared in the city, the city survey department has not even covered 25% of the city."

The largest number of applications approved was 24,772 in the east zone while the largest number of applications was from the south zone at 51,630.

Mumbai: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in Maharashtra announced a slew of steps to transform the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) into a global financial, commercial and entertainment hub